L'Heure Espagnole/Gianni Schicchi

Sunday 18 October 2009 19.13 EDT
First published on Sunday 18 October 2009 19.13 EDT

First seen in 2007, the Royal Opera's comic double bill of Ravel and Puccini returns for its first revival, and, with Elaine Kidd overseeing Richard Jones's productions, their dark-tinged humour seems more or less intact. The casts are significantly different, though: in L'Heure Espagnole, Ruxandra Donose has taken over as the far-from-immaculate Concepción, while in Gianni Schicchi the title role is now assigned to Thomas Allen.

Donose is feisty and dashingly sexy, very obviously too much of a handful for her clock-making husband Torquemada (Bonaventura Bottone). Christopher Maltman is once again the handsome hunk Ramiro, the muleteer who has to hump grandfather clocks up and down stairs, while Concepción attempts to hump Yann Beuron's Vic Reeves- look-alike Gonzalve and Andrew Shore's blustering Don Inigo Gomez. All are nicely judged portrayals, and if the comedy doesn't quite run with the smoothness of one of the kitschy clocks on the walls of John MacFarlane's 1950s set, it has its own cartoon-like charm, even though – as always in this opera – it's the miracles of Ravel's orchestral score, as revealed by Antonio Pappano, that demand most attention.

Full of morsels of savoury detail, Pappano's matchless Puccini conducting is also one of the major plusses of Gianni Schicchi. Updated from Dante's renaissance Florence, the production inhabits a world of unemptied chamber pots, garish floral wallpaper and damp ceilings that is recognisably the same shabby postwar Italy that Jones evoked in his staging of Cavalleria Rusticana for English National Opera last year. The grasping, petit-bourgeois family, all out for a share of the dead Buoso's money, are all wonderfully observed, too, with their scheming led by Elena Zilio's marvellous Zita and Gwynne Howell (celebrating 40 years with the Royal Opera) as Simone, while Marie McLaughlin's La Ciesca and Janis Kelly's Nella seem to be vying for the most garish frock.

Allen's sardonic Schicchi never disguises his contempt for any of them, but there is also a certain heartlessness about the way in which Jones's production manipulates the family's avarice, even if Maria Bengtsson's sweet-toned Lauretta and Stephen Costello's classy Rinuccio do give it all a sentimental, if not exactly authentically emotional, centre. But that is precisely what Puccini intended.